Table Topics
What news and information innovations are activating diverse communities?
Media providers share their work through informal displays and conversations. Here are the topics:
Allied Media Conference
Contact: N. Joy Beard
The Allied Media Conference will be hosted on Wayne State’s campus the week of June 17-20. The summit features a variety of workshops, hands-on activities, and the sharing of tools and tactics, centered around the idea of how grassroots organizations are using media locally and nationally. Hosted just before the U.S. Social Forum, also held in Detroit during the latter part of June, the AMC also serves to connect people within the community in general or community of activists, and build upon those relationships to create innovative media, improve the nature of communications, especially as represented with media channels, and transform media for a more just, equal world.
The Anti-Bias Handbook: A Journalist’s Guide to Creating an Open Mind
Contact: Sue Ellen Christian
Sue Ellen Christian is writing “The Anti-Bias Handbook: A Journalist’s Guide to Creating an Open Mind” for Holcomb Hathaway Publishers. She is soliciting the contributions of current and former journalists to help educate journalism students. She is seeking journalists’ brief personal stories or advice regarding on-the-job challenges with reporting and setting aside personal prejudices, assumptions, or preconceptions about news events, sources or topics. Her book strives to help young journalists be more aware of their habits of thinking that can lead to inaccuracies and stereotypes — of race, ethnicity, geography, physical abilities, gender issues, socio-economic status and cultural norms.
BLAC Detroit Magazine
Contact: Lori Robinson
B.L.A.C. is the premiere lifestyle magazine for African Americans in and around Detroit. We cover the people, places and issues of importance to our community. We strive to be inclusive of the entire African Disapora in our region, covering African descendants of various national and ethnic backgrounds. We also empower readers with the information they need to fully appreciate and enjoy metro Detroit. We are committed to providing our target audience—ranging in age from the late 20s to the upper 50s—with engaging, high quality editorial and visual content.
CLEonair at www.blogtalkradio.com
Contact: Cheryl Fields
Podcasting has been around in one form or another since the ’80s. The first MP3 players hit the market in the late 1990s, with the IPod emerging in 2001 and eventually spawning the term “podcast” in 2004. Since then, the podcast universe has exploded, including everything from music , news and educational content to career counseling, food preparation and political commentary. This tabletop will showcase one way podcasting is being used to deliver targeted content in a talk-radio-style interview program. Come learn about why the CLEonair program was developed, the content, the audience, the BlogTalkRadio service, and the production process as well as how the show is helping people engaged in locally focused social justice work to share their knowledge, information and experiences with others around the country. Visitors to the table will be able to listen to archived shows, and interact with the homepage and program switchboard.
Community Voices
Contact: Sonya Bernard-Hollins
Sonya Bernard-Hollins has had a passion for writing since grade school.
Her dedication continued throughout high school and college, and has led
to more than 20 years in journalism. As the editor/publisher of Community
Voices www.comvoicesonline.com, she wants:
1- to create an outlet for other young people to become the next
generation of journalist. Her goal is to provide an opportunity for young
people of diverse backgrounds to gain experience in various aspects of
journalism (print, online, broadcast, radio) while showcasing their works
in Community Voices. Students would be assigned to real assignments and
obtain experience and pay. Sonya wants feedback on how to make this effort
most effective for the students and the communities and people they
feature. Also, how to obtain grants, funding, equipment,etc. to allow
students the most professional experience.
2- How to make Community Voices online newspaper an instrument in literacy
and work toward motivating those of all ages to read. Sonya is interested
in creating workshops, events and securing outstanding authors, journalist
and educators who would provide awareness to this issue in addition to a
fund-raising opportunity to provide scholarships to students interested in
careers in the field of journalism. She would like feedback in the areas
of securing speakers, innovative workshops/seminars that would inspire
those of all backgrounds in the community to participate,
funding/sponsors, and other ideas.
Ethnic Media In America: Images, Audiences, And Transforming Forces
Contact: Alice Tait
Ethnic Media in America draws on the qualitative and quantitative research of scholars in the fields of journalism and mass communications, speech communications, media, film and ethnic studies, history, sociology, economics, business, law and regulations. Together, these contributors answer three underlying questions:
– Why do ALANA groups seek to control or significantly influence Eurocentric media, or even own their own media systems?
– What challenges do ALANA groups face in seeking these forms of empowerment?
– Are ALANA groups and society in general better served when they do?
At the same time, they also raise important questions about how successful ALANA strategies can be in creating alternative images in economically viable ways for pluralistic American audiences.
High School Journalism Projects
Contact: Emilia Askari
1. An annual workshop for high school journalists from Detroit public schools. The aim of the workshop is to help the students do a better job reporting about health, science and the environment.
2. A project during the 2010-2011 school year with one classroom of Arab American middle schoolers at a Dearborn public school. Led by Joe Grimm and Emilia Askari, this project of the Asian American Journalists Association aims to give students more multi-media skills.
Locally Grown News
Contact: Michelle Ferrier
LocallyGrownNews.com is an online community designed to foster the eating locally movement. Our mission is to generate conversation around sustainable, healthy lifestyles.
The online community features eco-friendly, local topics about locally grown produce and other products. Robust user profiles allow members to connect with those with similar interests and passions.
Community members can:
* Learn about local foods and local producers
* Share seasonal recipes and prized gardens
* Find out about ideas for sustainable living
* Rate favorite markets
* Post regional events
Beta markets will be hosted in both Winston-Salem and Greensboro, NC.
Coming Soon: LocallyGrown Markets
Locally Grown Markets is a mobile application/online widget designed to provide just-in-time market and product availability information to consumers in the Piedmont Triad area of North Carolina. The goal is to encourage users to find and purchase locally produced goods, thus building local economies.
MIT Center for Future Civic Media
Contacts: Ingebord Endter and Christina Xu
The Center for Future Civic Media is creating technical and social systems for sharing, prioritizing, organizing, and acting on information. These include developing new technologies that support and foster civic media and political action; serving as an international resource for the study and analysis of civic media; and coordinating community-based test beds both in the United States and internationally.
Red Ink
Contact: Ryan O’Toole, MIT Center for Future Civic Media
Today, the collection and analysis of consumer behavior data is the exclusive domain of the largest corporations and governments. However, these entities rarely have consumer interests in mind when exploiting this personal and private data for gain.
Noticeably, personal, political, social, and community groups are disenfranchised from accessing consumer data, though doubtless the analysis could be used to support their missions. Ironically, these types of groups typically have large loyal constituencies who might be very willing to chip in a little data in order to support a purpose they believe in.
Red Ink is an attempt to remedy this information asymmetry by providing a public, socially driven, and Open Source Software solution to consumer analytics.
Red Ink is a Web site where people can freely self-organize to launch campaigns that target spending at specific businesses and regions. By joining a campaign a user grants it limited access to a stream or their bank statement data. The campaign uses the access to target specific purchases across all of its supporters. The targeted purchases are stripped of personally identifiable information, analyzed in their aggregate and published to the web in the form of charts, graphs, maps, and other embeddable visualizations. These can be custom built to be useful for a variety of purposes.
Red Ink is being developed at the MIT Media Lab with support from the Center for Future Civic Media and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.
RU Ready 4 BIZness
Contact: Laketa Dumas
I would like to share a Product Development activity that is given to my students. In addition, I want to show the products the special needs and general education students created I will share how the students raised $7000 in three months through selling their own products. In efforts to raised money for United States Patent and Trademark Office where they learned how to get a patent or trademark.
Small Town Revolution
Contact: Mark Anderson
How to turn small into an advantage.
In a small town, it would be easy to conduct a door-to-door media survey, asking people where they get their local news, where they share stories, and asking how we can get them to take part in an ongoing community-wide conversation. Armed with that information, a newspaper could start new conversations, tap into existing conversations, and move both the newspaper and the community in a forward direction.
You Are the Media: How Iranians “Democratized” the Media
Contact: Davar “Iran” Ardalan
This past June, as a Senior Producer at NPR News and through my ancestry and connections in Iran, Davar “Iran” Ardalan received hundreds of tweets, emails, photos and status updates from the front lines of the disputed Iranian election. She has collected and shaped the social media messages that poured out of Iran and into her inbox. Structuring them with interviews, reportage and photographs, “You Are the Media” reflects not only a dramatic and important moment in Iran’s political history but also a major turning point in the swiftly-changing nature of news and media around the world. Visit her table to discuss how journalism has evolved in Iran and is now “the most dangerous occupation in Iran,” according to exiled Iranian journalists Fereshteh Ghazi.